Wrench Turners - Overhauled S1E6 is now on your favorite podcast app!

Want to be a guest on Overhauled? - https://www.shopdiesellaptops.com/pages/podcast-guests

In this podcast your host Melissa Petersmann (The Diesel Queen) discusses diesel technicians, trucks, the diesel economy at large, and many more interesting topics in a style that only she can bring - raw and unfiltered. 

Melissa welcomes Joshua Taylor, mechanic, and founder of Wrench Turners. Wrench Turners is where service Leaders can gain insight into mechanic retention, specific technician value,
and mechanical repairer productivity, in just 12 minutes.

As always, thank you for watching and listening!

Connect with Guest:

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrjtaylor/
Twitter - https://twitter.com/mrjoshuataylor/
Website - https://wrenchturners.online/

Transcript for Wrench Turners - Overhauled S1E6

The Diesel Queen:

Hey, guys, this is The Diesel Queen here with Overhauled. I am here with Josh Taylor today. He is from Canada. Josh, why don't you introduce yourself, where you come from, what you're doing, your history in the industry, so on.

Josh Taylor:

Thanks, Mo. So I appreciate you and Diesel Laptops having me on the show. I really do appreciate it. Yes, I am Canadian. I am from America's biggest national park. Right now we're in the midst of winter, so it's snowing all the time out here. We do not necessarily live in igloos, but I digress. It's a little bit about me.

I started in this industry in automotive, roughly in 2001 as an apprentice up here north. We have a whole system, and I won't go into detail, but I did my apprenticeship at school, got my 310S license. That allows me to work on anything under 6,000 pounds diesel, as well as cars, trucks, SUVs, so on and so forth.

Worked on the bench, flat rate. Came off the bench, worked as an advisor. Got the opportunity to work at a bed store, at a high volume bed store, warranty admin, and so on and so forth. It was interesting seeing $1 million a month go through the shop. Got to work as a fixed office operations manager, as well as general manager at a collision center and some time has passed. Got to do some creative stuff with mobile repair on forklifts and so forth.

And since then, been coming up with different things, primarily going back for my second license, so I'm doing my motorcycle repair license now, as well as trying to help mechanics everywhere be happier and more productive in their day with Wrench Turner's online.

The Diesel Queen:

So what exactly is Wrench Turner's online? How are you helping mechanics? Explain that a little bit.

Josh Taylor:

So Wrench Turner's online is a, and more specifically, the Wrench Turner's Wellness Survey is a survey for both service leaders and for mechanics derived to improve the mechanics wellbeing in their environment. So whether it's performance-based, trust, shop environment, tools, we find a way to highlight areas service leader can correct without actually having to speak with the mechanics. Because we all know that shop meetings usually have someone standing at the front of the room talking at us, asking questions that none of us want to raise our hand to or answer.

So the survey allows service leader to provide to the shop. The shop anonymously responds to the survey, so there's no fear of reprisal. So you guys get to voice your opinions, voice your concerns, so on and so forth and then your automotive service leader gets to make some corrections and help you guys out.

The Diesel Queen:

We hope. That's it? That's cool though. That's cool. I've worked at a shop before that had, we had a suggestion box, which our boss thought was a great idea at the time, and you could put it in anonymously, or put your name on it. It didn't really matter. It really turned into more of a, I took a picture of someone doing stupid and printed it out and put it in the box and then said, "Hey..." We're mechanics. Sometimes we don't take things seriously.

But there was some good things that came from it too because there is sometimes a lack of communication in between mechanics and service advisors and the foremans. There's a whole chain of command there and sometimes a communication is not great. Every now and then you get a shop that's pretty good with communication, but I think that's a great idea to have a form of anonymous communication for...

Because the root of a lot of these issues is service managers and shops are trying to find a way to keep their mechanics because it's hard enough to get mechanics as it is, let alone keeping them. A lot of mechanics, their life expectancy in a shop is not more than three years.

A lot of mechanics, especially in this industry and especially in this time where you can walk down the street and not only start at a new shop but probably get a dollar an hour raise on top of what you were getting paid. It's hard for mechanics to have, at least from what I've seen in my experience, it's hard for mechanics to have the dedication to stay in one place, especially if there's problems with management, lack of communication, they don't feel like they're getting what they need from their shop, they don't feel like they're valued.

They can go down the street and get our a raise yesterday at eight other shops because everybody needs mechanics. So there's a big struggle right now with service managers trying to figure out, "Okay, how can we keep mechanics happy enough to stay, but also keep our production up and keep our work up and keep customers happy at the same time?" So what have you learned from running this site? What's the biggest complaint that mechanics usually have?

Josh Taylor:

So right now there is no one biggest complaint because each shop that has submitted information has each had and I call it the shop life 20. So there's 20 questions that are contextually for the shop, whether it's environment or trust or so forth. Each shop has had a different priority. So all of the questions are graded, and the mechanic gets to choose a zero to three. Obviously strongly disagree with the question or strongly agree with the question. And I rank them so from least priority to the highest priority.

Each shop has had a different mix, had a different priority for a different reason, and I've had the opportunity to look at some of that data and I get to review based on the number of years in service, the number of trade certificates they necessarily have or training that they have, or ASE certifications that they have, the hours they produce, they submit as well.

And whilst some trends you can expect, meaning those that make the most money are the most experienced and most well-trained, but not always the case. Conversely, you look at the bottom end of the scale, the ones that you expect to be the least productive in making the least amount of money you expect to be the least experienced and the least trained. Not always the case. You always have outliers.

But the big ones that seem to come up that not everybody necessarily thinks of, in one circumstance, and this is a layer on, I'm glad you brought up happy in there. The last part of the survey is about happiness.

The Diesel Queen:

Yeah.

Josh Taylor:

You ask them questions about their life and then be able to lay over contextually whose experienced based on, what their happiness level is, based on their experience, what their happiness level is based on shop productivity, what their happiness level is based on specific questions within the survey.

So now I'll give you an example. Of those that are surveyed, only 16% of the mechanics reported that they've been in the trade for 16 years or more. That leads to your-

The Diesel Queen:

I believe that. I believe that.

Josh Taylor:

... That leads to your previous statement that leaving the trade after a short period of time to 41%. Only 41% report that they can perform their best in the shop. 53% are changing jobs every 18 to 24 months.

The Diesel Queen:

Yep, yep.

Josh Taylor:

So these areas should really elicit a really big response from service leaders. Maybe I shouldn't necessarily change something in the shop that I want to change, that I think I should change, that I think is wrong. This is where those shop meetings and those suggestion boxes come into play where it's like, let's ask, while bringing back the fact that most of us don't want to answer because we don't... Maybe I'll get fired if I tell him that he doesn't know what he's doing.

The Diesel Queen:

Or you think it's pointless. There's some shops where you have that atmosphere where everybody's been preaching about how shit needs to change and they don't like this and they don't like that and nothing ever changes. And then they're like, "Well, it's not worth it."

Josh Taylor:

Right. And it's the reason, the biggest reason why I'm doing what I'm doing right now, and the reason why the wellness survey got created is earlier on in this year, I read an article, now it's a little bit old, it's 2016, but I read an article posted by the CDC in America and the article is about suicides by profession. And in 2016 there was 38,000 suicides and filtering by profession in the top five spot was male mechanics.

The Diesel Queen:

Really? Hm.

Josh Taylor:

So that pivoted me from trying to think about how can we make automotive service shops more productive and make more money and stuff? Yes, that's fundamentally what the survey is going to get output, but my focus is on the mental and physical wellbeing of the mechanics in the shop.

The Diesel Queen:

Well, if your employees are happy, they'll take care of your company. Right? They'll want to try.

Josh Taylor:

More specifically, I want to see if I can find a way to help those that are on the bottom end of that happiness scale. Because the scale itself is at a 35 and it's five questions, I want to help those that are answering five at a 35. I want to make their lives better. I want them to be happy because that's no way to live regardless of what profession that we're in. That's no way to live.

If I can help them in some way, if I can help their service leader improve their environment so that five goes to a 10 or that five goes to a 15 or that five goes to a 20, so they're happy. A, they're happy and I'm helping somebody, but B, now they're better at what they do, they're more confident at what they do, they're producing more, which then in terms makes them more happy because if they could pay their bills, they're happier. If they can support the family, they're happier. So it's a inverted thought. Stop thinking about the money, start helping the people. When you start helping the people, the people start making the money.

The Diesel Queen:

Yep. I agree with that statement wholeheartedly. And you're right, there is some shops you work in where there's always a few guys that are just always happy to be there and everybody's like, "How the fuck can you do that? We're working Saturdays, bro. How are you happy? How are you this happy to be at work?" And it's not like, they've got families, they've got all the normal people shit.

And I used to work with this guy at one of the shops in Wyoming named Johnny, and he was one of my favorite coworkers ever. Just because he, his aura was just happy and positive and he was always joking. And it is, having somebody like that in the shop changes the entire, and he would come down from a different shop to help us when we were slow. And I always looked forward to having him come because every time he came down, everybody's happiness went up a little bit.

Everybody's attitude was better. And it's not like he was leading us or doing anything. He was just a field mechanic that was down to help everybody and help us. And he was one of my favorite mechanics to work with just because he's just one of those people that's always happy. But you go into work in shops where there's not that, the service managers are pissed off, the mechanics are pissed off, the foreman is pissed off, the service writers are pissed off. Yeah, you can feel it. You walk in and everybody just seems pissed off.

And especially in this trade in the trades, it's so hard to, you have to deal with a lot of bullshit. A lot, whether between customers and machines are not a walk in the park to try and fix. They're not a walk in the park to diagnose all the time. So you're having to deal with a lot of mental capacity at the same time. Is there, so is there a correlation between the years of experience and the general happiness of mechanics?

Josh Taylor:

As an average, the average is low. So if you take a synopsis of every mechanic that's responded to this survey thus far, the average is neutral or lower.

The Diesel Queen:

For everybody? There is no correlation?

Josh Taylor:

If you look at the average, the average is that it's dissatisfied or neutral on the happiness scale. If you want to pick apart the sub sex of top/bottom experience on average, those who are low on the experience scale are not happy. And those who are high on the experience scale are happy. But again, it's not always the case. So only 13% of the high producer, high performer, experienced folk are reporting that they're happy.

So every section has little pieces that you have to try and fill in the gaps. So that's where you compare, how does the shop environment look? How does the shop tools look? How does the shop trust look? Each shop is going to be a little bit different, how much they weight trust, how much they weight performance, how much they wait on advisors and so forth. And then you layer that with the happiness.

Okay, so and this is where the sections of data and how you stack them matters. So when you pull information from someone who's got 25 years in the trade, who has 16 or more ASE certifications, who has doctor of the house of that brand, you should listen to that person. What they have to say matters. So when they rank the service advisors zero out of three, the likelihood that you have good service writers is low.

The Diesel Queen:

True.

Josh Taylor:

That's a genuine answer, especially if they are still high-producing. And this is where you can then look at, okay, I get the opportunity to look at it. You got high production, high base labor pay, high trade training, high certification, lots of years in, and they're doing all that and they still have crap advisors. That's a problem. You can imagine how much better that entire shop would be if you look at service advisors first or how the communication works.

Conversely, if you've got somebody who's got a year in the trade or two years in the trade and says the service advisors fucked, you don't necessarily want to weight that as important. But when everybody in the shop rates of service advisors a zero or one, you can take that into account as well.

So it's a stacking of data that you can compile. Okay, this makes sense, this makes sense, this makes sense. Okay, this is the area that Mr. or Mrs. Service advisor or Mr. or Mrs. Service manager should look at. These are the top three, your top two things that they need right now to repair in the shop.

The Diesel Queen:

Yeah, and it's interesting because shop dynamics are a very complex thing as I'm sure you've learned and like you just said earlier, every shop is different. In the shops that I worked at, we used to joke about when you would get a new apprentice in and they were full of life, we would call it. A new mechanic's full of life. And we would always joke about it. It was like, "God, give him three years. All that hopes and dreams will be crushed into the dirt." But we used to joke about it because we're like, "Oh, the industry's going to crush that right out of him."

And it's funny because I was in the industry for seven years, so I went through that entire scale of just starting out fresh out of trade school, don't know shit to, I had seven John Deere capstones and was one of the highest paid techs in the shop of the last two or three shops I worked in. One of the. Not the. I was never... I bounce back and forth with another mechanic usually on who is higher, I guess.

It depended on the shop dynamic because there's also been shops I've worked in that I'm just not fucking happy in and it's really, really hard to produce. Like you were saying, it's hard to want to produce and perform and you're not happy. And I was going through a lot of, I've had personal things affect my work. That's a whole nother thing. How well can this person separate personal life from work life?

I am not very good at that. I will be the first to admit that. But I went through that whole stage and I remember when I was starting in this industry, the first day I walked into that John Deere dealership and I started working on cranes, I worked like 110, 120 hour paychecks for the first few months. And I just thought that was the most badass thing ever. I felt like a badass. I was so excited to be there. I wanted to be there. I was having so much fun. The fucking tires are bigger than me and I'm like all over that shit because I'm working on cranes and I'm so excited and I loved it.

And I would work any overtime that was available for the first two, three years of my career. I wanted to be there so bad. And I still love what I do, but it's funny how it changes over time from that young and almost young and dumb version of myself to now, one of the big reasons that I exited the industry for diesel laptops was because in the area that I'm living at now, you cannot find a shop, a John Deere. I wanted to stay with John Deere because I have seven years invested in John Deere. I couldn't find a shop that doesn't work Saturdays.

And I struggle with wanting to give up six out of the seven days of my week. Two day weekend is a healthy thing. And I understand that there's production, there's making money. John Deere requires their ag dealerships to be open on Saturdays for the lawnmower people, but it's still disheartening. Nobody wants to be there on fucking except for the young kid that started two weeks ago that's super excited to prove himself. He does, but nobody else wants to be there because everybody else has family. I've got horses, I've got dogs, I've got a fucking bed I'd like to sleep in. Right?

I got other things I'd rather do than be at work on Saturdays. And that was part of the reason of me exiting this industry is I'm like, I want a family and I want to run my own business and I want to start my own business and I really want to get into doing my own thing and that's not fucking possible working six-day weeks. Granted it was like five and a half days technically, but still.

Josh Taylor:

As a mechanic that's working full-time and full-time is, I don't even know if there's an appropriate word for full-time and mechanic in the same sentence because for most of us full-time is all of the hours that they can give you, extra overtime, and Saturdays and Sundays if something needs to get cleaned up for most. That's not life. That is simply work. And most of us have gone through that for most of our lives.

And I think at this particular juncture, we're seeing folks who, for lack of a better phrase, won't tolerate it anymore.

The Diesel Queen:

Yeah.

Josh Taylor:

We've gotten ourselves, unfortunately, and I look at this from a slightly different perspective than most, I think. It's our fault. We have spent generations of time in dealerships and independent stores, in franchise stores, in little mom-and-pop store is saying and feeling that this is acceptable to be treated this way.

And at this point we're seeing a decline in, especially here in Canada because it's how the apprenticeships styles works. They forecast how many registrations that they need to fulfill the journeyman end, and right now it's 10%. Registrations. Forget about certifications at the end. The registrations for the apprenticeship is 10% of what it needs. Forget about the registration.

So nobody wants to work in this industry for a lot of reasons. It's not just the fact that many dealerships, regardless of whether it's tractors, whether it's power sports, whether it's marine, or automotive, they're requiring more and giving less and wondering why folks don't want to come in. And we're seeing a slight shift in the last 18 to 24 months where there's an opportunity to signing bonuses and there's an opportunity to make more money per hour than many folks have ever seen. There's more and more of that opportunities and negotiation. Leverage is starting to occur.

For example, Saturdays used to be just, that's what it was. You work Saturdays. There was no negotiation. You didn't have negotiation of how much you were making per hour. You just came in, "Oh, you're starting, this is how much you're making, but nope, this is how much you're making you working Saturday. I'll see you 8:00 to 2:00 on Saturdays."

"But I've got..."

"No, I'll see you 8:00 to 2:00 on Saturdays." That's coming to a close. That's going to rapidly come to a close and not everybody wants to work Saturdays. And if you do want to work Saturdays, great. If that's for you, great, but understand that as a trade, as a profession, we have to start negotiation not only finding good leadership, but looking at the entire package that they're offering.

What am I working, what am I expected to work? What am I expected to produce? How much am I making? Is there benefits? Is there pension? Is there 401K? Am I working Sundays? Am I expected to come in? Am I specifically paying for my comebacks? Am I doing warranty at warranty time or am I doing it at CP time and you're claiming the warranty time?

There is a plethora of things to negotiate when you start with a shop. And right now we have the advantage of leveraging the labor market. Now that's going to swing, at some point, I expect it's going to swing the other way. Right?

The Diesel Queen:

Mm-hmm.

Josh Taylor:

At some point somebody's going to get too greedy and that's going to be enough, is enough. But I don't think that we're anywhere close to that side. I don't even think we're anywhere resembling a balance between the two.

The Diesel Queen:

Well, there's a fine line. Right? There's a fine line between these companies, they need to make money and to make money, they need to have customers happy and to have the customers happy. These customers have grown accustomed to a six-day work week in a sense. These customers have grown accustomed to, "Yes. We can finish this on Saturday. Yes, we can do this on Saturday. Yes. We'll be open on-

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The Diesel Queen:

... on Saturday. Yes, we can do this on Saturday. Yes, we'll be open on Saturday. Yes, we can do this. Yes, we'll work more hours. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. And that's kind of what you have to do, to an extent, right? Because you're the customer, they're the ones who are paying you. But there's a fine line between doing that and then the mechanics that you need to be entering the industry are going like, "Fuck that, I'm out." So there's a fine line. Maybe you can shed some light on how do you find that median between, okay, I am asking way too much of my mechanics for the customer. And this is way too much because in a sense you need to have the industry, what's the word I'm looking for? Look good in a sense to newcomers.

You don't want the newcomers seeing the guy that's 25 and looks like he's 40 because he's been working enough hours to be 40 by now. You know, that's not appealing to people. I grew up a lot differently than a lot of people in my generation. My father was a logger. He still outworks me, there's been very few weeks, even when I was working 110-hour paychecks that I outworked him in hours. And he's a logger, so he's doing this as a trade. And so I was raised around that a little bit. But there's a lot of my generation that's not, there's a lot of my generation that was raised that a 40-hour work week is a 40-hour work week, that's normal. That's what everybody expects. And then they look at this industry and they see, oh fuck, it's not 40-hour weeks. It's 50-hour weeks plus five or six hours on Saturday.

Josh Taylor:

So one of the great opportunities that I've had in the last almost year is I got turned into Service Drive Live, a meeting of fixed up minds on Sundays. And there's been a lot of service leaders who are in the game, not consultants, not coaches or trainers, but some service leaders who are making some really big waves in how to make life work and be a mechanic. One thing that seems to be present in every amazing service drive, in every amazing service shop is a high value leader. And you and I, I can almost guarantee you've heard high value man, high value woman thrown around on TikTok and LinkedIn and everything else like that.

The Diesel Queen:

It's a trend.

Josh Taylor:

It's a very big trendy word, but I use it as high value leader. High value leader is empathetic, high value leader listens, high value leader understands the crew that they're leading. And the last thing they want to do is put their team in a position where they can't perform. A team that can't perform is one that's overworked. A team that can't perform is one that doesn't have the right training. A team that can't perform works 15-hour days and is expected to do so. High value leaders come up with ways to make it work. Does it mean four-day work weeks? And then having two shifts of people, two crews of people. So now you have overlap. So you can have the store open seven days, not just six, because there'll be people who choose to work the weekends because they'd rather work the weekends and have during the week off so they can spend time with the kids, get them to and from school.

Is there people who want to work just during the week, have that flexibility. And high value leaders understand that. If that's what they see can make their team work well, they're going to do that because they're listening to their team. There is no one answer to make a team work well, because every team is different, every store is different, every culture is different, every catchment area around a store is different. You can't expect Ed Roberts down at Bozard Ford in Florida to have the same kind of catchment area with a hundred techs under his purview as a gentleman up in Virginia who's got eight. Not even close to the same store size, they don't have the same revenue, he doesn't have the same resources at their disposal. You don't have that at your disposal. So you have to come up with what works best, as best as I can for the team and for the customers. I've said this the other day, if you take care of the team, the team will take care of the business. You take care of the customers, the customers will take care of you. End of chat.

The Diesel Queen:

And that's kind what I was getting at because I can see, as much as I'm a mechanic and I have a little bit of a bias opinion on some things, because I was on the mechanic side of things, I did run a shop for about three months while they were trying to find a new boss. I could not get hired on there because my boyfriend at the time, my ex was the field mechanic. So that would've been a conflict of interest. But I did run it temporarily for about three months. And I tried really hard to have a good balance of, used my knowledge over the course of the seven years, or at the time it was six years of experience that I had in this industry to create, okay, how can I do this and not it up catastrophically, right?

Because I'm a mechanic. Yeah, I've been helping, I was like my boss's right hand man, and I've been helping him this whole time. If he took days off, I took over for him for those few days, made sure things went smoothly, tried to help him out. It was a really, really small store. So everybody had to pitch in. Everybody had to do a little bit more than what their job title was to make it work. But we all had kind of a personal, I don't want to say vendetta, we all had a personal feeling towards a shop because we were all there when it started. I set up the tool room and put away all the tools that the company had bought for us. We were there when the building wasn't even completed yet, helping doing things and finishing it up and getting it set up.

And we all went through those growing pains of through this shop opened and then two months later, COVID hit. So we all went through that, trying to build the customer basis in the first place and then COVID hits and then trying to make it through COVID and make it through things getting shut down, which I was in Wyoming, things did not get shut down the way they did in the rest of the country. But then the oil and gas crisis hit and all that shit. So we had a lot of growing pains our first year in that shop. So we all felt kind of personally responsible for the shop. So I personally cared a lot about it succeeding when I was asked to kind of take over for a few months until they hire another boss because the original boss decided to relocate.

And the one thing I learned is, and this is just coming from three months of service manager experience, okay, so correct me if I'm wrong, I'm not going to say this is a hundred percent right, but I think one of the most important things when it comes down to customers and keeping your customers and your technicians happy is to set realistic fucking goals for your customers. Most customers are completely fucking fine if you tell them, "Hey, this might have to wait a day," or, "Hey, we're not going to make it there until late afternoon. I'm not a hundred percent sure we will make it because he has another job, but I will let you know." I always planned an extra day in advance just to make sure we could be there when we said we were going to be there, even if other things fuck up. And what it ended up creating is, I was the only shop mechanic unless we had other mechanics come down and help me.

So I kind of was up to here and I had to work in the shop and try to work in the office, which was challenging. And then I also had to run the field mechanics. And I learned really fast, "If I schedule this, if I schedule their field calls to where they're not in a high stress situation," and then the customer is getting their expectations met because I gave a realistic date that we would be there. Not a date that of, if everything goes perfectly smoothly that I jam packed into five days worth of work into a day, then we'll be there today kind of thing. And it turned out really good, for the most part I don't believe I had that many customers, I had one customer get mad because he asked me to machine down a part and I did. They were the ones who looked at the part numbers and got us the part numbers. I machined down the part number they gave me and it didn't show up. And I get why they're mad, right? Because they paid $500 to have this cylinder shipped from Deere.

Well this was during COVID and this was during the whole time when the warehouses were having problems being staffed and they weren't getting parts shipped out. You couldn't stock order anything from John Deere for eight months. Everything you bought had to be machine down everything or they wouldn't ship it. So this part took like a fucking week. And I understand why the customer was mad, because he paid $500 for overnight shipping and he got it in a week. It's like, "Well, we didn't really have a choice." So that was the only occasion I know of that they were really mad at me for. But I don't know, the biggest key factor that I learned was setting realistic expectations for the customers on the timeframe you're going to be there, how long you think the job's going to take and how long you think it's going to take for parts, be realistic with them.

Josh Taylor:

That's a lot to unpack, but it's not at the same time. 'Cause what you're talking about is clear, transparent, follow through communication. It is really, really complex and really, really simple all at the same time. And that's where so far in my experience in my career as well as the information that in the one-to-ones with mechanics that I'm doing is coming through, my opportunities to speak with service leaders is coming through, communication is the key to just about everything. If you are clear and you are transparent to your customers whether you're a mechanic who sells the job directly to the customer because they are in a shop you are working in, you had direct communication with the customer, especially when you're doing it for your field techs. Or you could be talking about a service advisor communicating to the customer clear, transparent communication so that the customer knows what to expect. And then you follow through on what you've promised.

Subsequently, when you're doing the same thing with your technicians, when you are clear and transparent with the workload, what needs to be done. So it isn't, "Well am I doing an oil change on that D6 or am I am just doing the finals on the D6? Or what am I doing? Am I going into old Johnson's road and fixing his tractor or am I going," if they understand what they're going to do, clear, transparent communication. If they understand, there's no questions, no missed labor opportunities, they're not overwhelmed or stressed. The same thing happens in a high volume shop. You get a shop of a hundred techs, you can't, individual advisors aren't necessarily talking to just one tech. They could be talking to 15 or 20 or 30 or 40 of them in the shop because they might have that many work orders in their stack to deal with, clear, transparent communication. And that's coming out in the survey too. Clear, transparent communication is wanted by everybody. The service laser wants it, the mechanics want it, the service advisors want it. Everybody wants to be clear so everybody can do their job. Everybody just wants to come in, do their job and go home. Fundamentally, even the workaholics just want to come in and work a lot longer, but work a lot longer and then go home.

The Diesel Queen:

Yeah, and I agree with that and it's the communication part. And the three field mechanics I guess that I had working underneath me at the time, one of them was like, "Hey, I need a little bit more overtime." That's fine. The other ones were like, as long as we're getting work done, they're like, "Please don't schedule me till eight o'clock in the fucking night." So I did. I made sure that if they were going to go do a long haul, that it was scheduled so they would leave in the fucking morning. Because it's Wyoming, everything is like an hour away, at least, everything. And in the wintertime, that can mean closed roads, that can mean you got to get... True story, one of the field technicians have had to have their field truck pulled up a hill by a dozer to get to the machine that was broken because the roads were so snowy and shitty, things happen.

So why try to cram three field jobs into a day that are all an hour away from the shop when it's probably a better idea to schedule one, maybe two if they're kind of close to each other, and leave it at that. Instead of having your mechanics start the day at six o'clock in the morning 'cause they came in early so they could get there on time and then end up not getting home until 10 o'clock at night and then the next day you've already scheduled them for shit because you had unrealistic expectations on how long things were going to take. And I don't know, that's just my humble opinion on that. I also didn't work in a shop that was two months out, four months out. I have worked in those shops, but I wasn't trying to run a shop that was four months out in work.

So when a shop gets to the point where they're four months out as far as a work line, I can understand why they're trying to push mechanics to work as many hours as they can because they've got a huge fucking load of shit they're trying to mash down. But on the other hand, the more mechanics you push away by making them work a lot, you're not getting the mechanics into the field. So if you keep pushing them away and pushing them away, you're going to whittle your crew down to the point where it's going to actually hurt you more than it would be to just maybe cut the mechanics that already work there, cut their hours down a little bit. The ones that want it, obviously, like you said, there's workaholics that want to be there every second of every day. By all means, go for it.

Josh Taylor:

You were hitting a nail on the head with realistic expectations and it's individualized expectations. For those who don't want to work more than their 40-45, as a leader I don't see any reason why that needs to be pressured. If you've got a solid C or B player that comes into work, works hard while they're at work and goes home, that's an invaluable asset to the business. And if you try and pressurize that individual, are you actually doing them any good? Are you doing the customer any good? Not really. And to those folks who do actually find themselves in that position where they want to go to work, they want to work hard and they want to go home, they want to make the business money, they want to make the customers happy, it's not their problem that the business itself, when you're talking about booked four months out, it's not their problem that you haven't been capable of hiring more staff to fulfill the need.

It's that clear cut and dry. It is that clear cut and dry, because if you have staff on that team that's booked four months out, if you have staff on that team that's not producing, it's up to the service leader to review their performance. Is their lack of performance due to training? Is their lack of performance due to environment? Is their lack of performance due to drive? Do they want or need coaching? And if the service leader has gone through all of the steps, genuinely has gone through all the steps to try and bring them up, if they've done all those steps, why is that person still employed?

The Diesel Queen:

Because at this point people need warm bodies.

Josh Taylor:

Warm bodies aren't helpful, warm bodies aren't helpful.

The Diesel Queen:

I agree with you. I agree with you. But actually I've had this exact conversation with the service manager before about a very particular couple employees that worked there. And I told him, I'm like, "Dude, these people can just walk in and bitch and then get a pay raise. What the fuck?" Or, "Dude, this person is sucking the life out of everybody," they have to have their hand held and they've got four years of experience and they still have to have their hand held with everything. Everybody needs help. I'm not saying that you shouldn't help each other, but I asked him, I'm like, "Why are these people still employed?" One of these, of which was a 10 year mechanic that didn't even work 40 hour weeks. He worked like 28, 30 hour weeks. He didn't feel like being there any longer than that. Why is he here? And I made that comment to him a million times. I'm like, "Why the fuck is he here? Why the fuck are these people here?" And that's what I got told was-

Josh Taylor:

Let's analyze that 28 hour technician and look at it from their lens for a second, and let's try and look at the devil's advocate side of that story. Is this individual coming to work, working and going home?

The Diesel Queen:

I mean, I wouldn't use the word work to describe what he was doing. He was more like a health and safety hazard to everybody, but.

Josh Taylor:

Okay, well let's try and be proactive and let's try to be beneficial to somebody in this particular circumstance like you were in and like many shops find themselves in with one or more of the team members that are not positive for the team. Being negative about the situation isn't going to help anybody, isn't going to help the team, isn't going to help the service manager, isn't going to help the parts department, it's not going to help anybody if you're not positive. Being negative about these people in the shop, carrying that negativity through the shop. At the very beginning of this conversation, you were talking about, you had somebody who was the field tech who would come in the shop and was so positive and you could feel the energy in that shop lift when they walk through the shop, well the opposite's true. Do you have somebody that is horribly negative walking through the shop or in the shop all the time? They're bringing everybody down. It's up to the service leader to look at their team, look at their production, look at their happiness, look at their environment and say, "This person is not actually benefiting the team."

And I'll give you a slightly different example. So a couple years back at a GM, as a GM, at a collision store, we had a gentleman who was an exceptionally high producer, made us a lot of money. He was averaging 150, 160% efficiency. Big dollars, big dollars. He gave his two weeks. The owner and I were bricks because we're talking like lynchpin kind of production, and he was in a lynchpin area of the shop. He didn't want more money. Owner offered him more money, he was just leaving. I don't remember where he was going or why he was going, but he was leaving. Three days after he left, the production didn't change. You're talking about an individual producing 150%. So working eight hours, producing 12 consistently every day, 12 hours of a warm body leaving the building. And within three days that production was taken over by the rest of the team. That individual was hyper toxic and we didn't know.

So it's important not only as the team, but as service leaders that you review your team with your team, is everybody positive? Is everybody working well together? Do you trust Joe to do the transmission on that whatever?" Is that Alison transmission coming out and fall on the floor or is that Alison transmission coming out and on its proper cradle? Is Johnny going to blow up another head because he didn't put the valves in right? Is little Joe down in the corner who does all the alignments, is he going to forget to recalibrate the plates every single time? Is he going to clean the plates after he does an alignment after a snowfall and it's covered in salt and grease and all kinds of shit. So the next guy who comes in has to take an hour to clean them before he can do an alignment.

These are really questions that we as the team, not just the service leaders need to ask them. You know as well as I do that if we don't talk about this to the people that matter, to decision makers, it's not going to get fixed. I understand that there's lots of shops out there that feel like they can't, but it might as well be a waste of fucking time because they've got people and might as well be bashing their head against a concrete wall. I feel for those people, I've been in shops like that. That's no way to live.

The Diesel Queen:

Same.

Josh Taylor:

No, it's no way to live.

The Diesel Queen:

And it's hard because like I said, that conversation I had with my service manager at the time, he was like, "This guy a lot of up and he loses a lot of money and doesn't show up," or whatever. There's a couple of people in this scenario and he's like, "But the work they do do is still making a small profit and still helps us keep our workload down a little bit." I'm like, "Dude, he's also creating the workload." Everybody fucks up, everybody does. If you watch the other episodes I have on here, I am a big preacher of, the only true mistake you make is one you make twice. Everybody goes through fuck ups. The first two years of your career as a mechanic, you're going to feel like you fuck up everything you touch. It's just kind of how it is.

Josh Taylor:

Or you're afraid to fuck up everything you touch.

The Diesel Queen:

Yeah. But I've also been an advocate of, you fix your own fuck ups. And when it starts to turn into the point where, this kid is fucking shit up and somebody else has to fix it every single time. I mean these... And that's another thing I've covered in some of my podcast series is, some of these apprentices and these young kids do not have the proper understanding or expectations of what this industry is. They walk into a shop with their fancy little trade school degree, and they're like, "I'm going to be rebuilding engines tomorrow." It's like, "No the fuck you're not." You got to prove that you can do the little shit good first, you've got to work your way up into getting the big jobs. It's back to your trust, the comment you just made on trust-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:50:04]

The Diesel Queen:

It's back to your trust, the comment you just made on trust. You have to build that trust with your service managers. And a lot of it is the trust that you're actually going to try hard. You're going to try hard. You're going to read the manuals, you're going to do your best to do it correctly. You're not just going to fucking throw shit apart and throw it back together as fast as you can and not give a fuck how good it is as long as it's out the door.

I've seen it a lot, and I've seen it with women too, where they walk into a shop and they're doing oil changes for three months and they're like, "Oh my God, they must hate me because all I'm doing is oil changes and it must be something against me." It's like, no, that's how almost everybody starts. If you can't prove that you can do an oil change right, how the fuck can you expect a service manager to give you more work? And I've seen that a lot.

Josh Taylor:

Even if they go to trade school. And I'm technically doing trade school again right now, and we're going back over stuff that I've touched a bit over my career. But because of the dealerships in the shops that I've been, I didn't have to do a lot of it. I did some of it. I did a lot of it on my own, because I've had almost 30 cars now and I've had a race car and I've modified lots of stuff. And I used to do lots of race car kinds of stuff after hours. But how often do you mike a piston? Almost never. Almost never. How often are you looking at ring gap? How often are you doing those things? If I ask someone who's fresh out of trade school, other than the trade school we have up here in the north, it's a little bit different.

But if, fresh out of a community college, it's just trying to get somebody in the door. If you ask them, "What's the piston gap? What's the piston cylinder gap clearance? What should it be?" Will they know that it should be a couple tenths of a thou? And will they understand that phrase? Probably not. So going back to your service manager experience, realistic expectations. And then subsequently mentors.

When I got to start in this trade back in 2001, I had the luxury of a mentor. There was five of us. There was five apprentices at that store, and we had a real, honest-to-goodness production foreman. And every week, every Tuesday, he'd hand us a work order and say, "Figure it out." And back then the five of us would stand around whatever it was, we'd get out the multimeters or we'd get out the gauges or we'd get out whatever, and we'd get out another piece of paper and we'd write all the shit down and we'd test everything out and we'd pull out the manual and da, da, da, da, da. And the four or five of us, depending on the night, smoking cigarettes, drinking double doubles, trying to figure out what's wrong. We'd go home like 11, 12 o'clock at night, come back the next morning and say, "Here, this is what's wrong." And he'd go, "Nope." And then he'd tell us why. And he'd walk us through. We had a high-value leader. I had a mentor for a solid almost three years. Many aren't getting that luxury.

The Diesel Queen:

I agree with that.

Josh Taylor:

And it did a couple things. It did more than just teach me little bits on how to fix a car and how to diagnose stuff. I was an arrogant little shithead. I'm an arrogant asshole now still, but I'm less because of him. I knew everything. I could fix everything. I was so arrogant. And he'd tell me every day, "I need to put my boot in your ass every single day until you figure out that you don't know shit from shit. Do you know what that pile is over there? Shit. Do you know what that pile is over there? Shit. Well, once horseshit, once cow shit, if you don't know shit from shit, how can I trust you with an oil change?" Right? So, I had that.

That, to me, going back to reference the survey, if such a small number, 16% of mechanics are saying that they have more than 16 years of experience in this trade, how the fuck are those young folks coming into this trade with less than two years experience expected to gain the knowledge of those at 25 years plus? We're losing it. We're losing it in droves. And that's the crisis, not just the labor shortage. We're losing our knowledge because we're pushing them away.

The Diesel Queen:

And you get people, once they get to their five, four to 10 year mark, that's kind of a big gap. But once you get people in around there, the numbers, I feel, people exiting the industry trying to find something else, moving up in the shop, moving into a different position in the company, it's kind of high. I'm a prime example of that. I reached the point in my career where I was really proficient at the manuals. I was really proficient at a lot of things. Obviously I still have struggles with some things. Obviously I have a lot to learn still, but I reached a stage that I did not need to get my hand held. I knew how to do almost everything. And if I didn't know how to do it, I had the tools. I had the mental tools and facilities to be able to figure it out, figure out how to do it.

Because that's what a lot of people mistake mechanics for is they think, "Oh, you know how to do all this stuff." It's like, no the fuck I don't. I know how to figure out how to do it. I've been working on my boyfriend's 2015 fucking Challenger. You think I've ever touched a fucking Challenger in my life before his car? No. I've never even touched a two-wheel drive car. Ever. Ever. Okay? I've been working at John Deere on diesels, and owning diesels three quarter ton and bigger, for my entire life. But I fucking figure it out.

Sometimes I struggle and I have problems, but for the most part, I have the mental structure and the mental facilities to figure it out. And I think that's what makes decent mechanics, that's really the experience. I really feel like that's a value in the experience. It's not memorizing things. It's not memorizing specs, or memorizing part numbers, or memorizing exactly what manual you found this in. It's the mental tools you have to be able to figure things out. I don't know how else to put it, besides mental tools.

Josh Taylor:

It's foundational knowledge. Couple of things, like you putting in the time. So during the time where I was flat rate, to finish off the last phrase or sentence or diatribe that I was on, I had the luxury of a high-value shop foreman and leader early in the trade. And it's vital for service leaders to recognize that the folks that are coming off the trade and either going to the desk or leaving the trade altogether, you need to do everything you possibly can to keep them in the trade. Give them opportunities to teach the young folk coming in, to give them a reason to stay.

The Diesel Queen:

Well, I have a little bit of a unique situation when it comes to that. For the last two years, my own business has been thriving. I make three times as much, sometimes, a month in my own business. 30% tax is not included, but I make at least steadily double what I make in my own personal business than what I was making at work. And what I was making at work was not necessarily a small wage. Mechanics are actually getting paid fairly decently, especially compared to the rest of the world right now. I couldn't find a middle ground. It was either leave the industry and pursue my own dreams of my own business, a family, have time to enjoy my life because I could afford it. Do that and get a job, like I have, that I'm trying to help people.

I'm trying to help service managers understand how they can fix the technician shortage in their own shops and just share general mechanic experiences and diesel industry shit to unveil this industry to maybe people that don't know that much about it. And I love the image and I love the goal that Diesel Laptops is trying to do here. And I love being a part of it, but what I don't like is there's not really another option right now for me.

There's either, I'm doing this and I sit at a desk, which is not my thing, but I sit at a desk and I'm not really working that much. I mean, to me, sitting at a desk is not hard work and it is not mentally stimulating. It's not very taxing to me. It's either that, or I work six days a week. Where the fuck is the in between? I honestly probably would not have left the industry if I could have found a shop that would've just let me work 40 hours a week and been done. If I could work either four tens or five eights or, honestly, even if I could work four twelves and five 10-hour days and had my weekend, I probably wouldn't have left.

Josh Taylor:

And that's the thing. Many are now looking for that. You have folks like Jay Goninen at WrenchWay. You have an entire platform for reverse lookup for technicians to try and find leaders that are looking for you. That's a big deal because you, a top tier mechanic, should be able to find a leader. And this is where I've said it already, and I'm going to say it again. The first priority of any aspiring or existing mechanic should be is finding a high-value leader.

Nothing else matters until you find a high-value leader. Because what is that high-value leader going to provide you, the mechanic? They're going to provide you an environment you want to work in. They're going to provide product you want to work on, and they're going to provide you a pay plan that suits you, and they're going to provide all of the tools and resources you need to be successful. Without a high-value leader, you might get one of those, not all of them. I'm just using WrenchWay as an example, but it's a great platform, an absolutely great platform. If you put yourself on there and you found a shop that's in California that does all the things, they might pay to relocate you if that's what you want to do. If you really, really want to do it.

The Diesel Queen:

I have people offer to relocate me all the time. My LinkedIn inbox is full of companies trying to relocate me to work in their shop full of it.

Josh Taylor:

But the difficulty is you don't necessarily know, that if you fly 5,000 miles or train all of your tools and all of your gear 5,000 miles, if they actually are a high-value leader. So that's the really hard sticking point. But if you do find that high-value leader, the things that you can do together.

The Diesel Queen:

But here's the issue here though, with that is I completely agree with what you're saying, completely, a hundred percent. But I've worked in shops that I have had a very high-value leader. They are fucking awesome. They are advocating for the shit I need, they're advocating for the shit that mechanics are asking for. They're trying their hardest to keep mechanics happy. The people above them don't give a fuck. The people above them see numbers and they're pushing on that leader, that is a high-value leader, to get numbers. And so it's not even just like you need one leader that's high value. You need the entire company. It needs that...

Josh Taylor:

Yeah, it's all of leadership.

The Diesel Queen:

... Up the entire fucking ladder.

I was so surprised when I came to Diesel Laptops, because I'm so used to getting hired onto the shops and they make all these promises, all these promises, half of them maybe come true. I just got used to that. As an industry standard, I got used to the fact that employers are going to talk out their ass, try and get you hired on because they need mechanics.

I started talking to Tyler, and this is actually the second time he tried to hire me. He tried to hire me to do this exact thing three years ago, and I told him no, I wasn't done turning wrenches. And he promised me all this stuff. He's like, "We are going to do this for you, we're going to do that for you. We're going to pay you this. We're going to get you all set up. We're going to give you everything you need to do all the stuff we want you to do. And on top of that, we're going to try and find you sponsors for the tools for your shop that we are going to..." They want to have me rebuild engines for their training facilities, which I want to do. And he made all these promises, and he has kept every single one of them. There has not been a single thing that he told me he was going to do that he hasn't done yet.

Josh Taylor:

So there's no "but" to your statement. So going back where you said high-value leader, but the person above them. High-value leader is high-value leader. That includes ownership. They are the leader of their business. Each person who leads parts of that team needs to be a high-value leader. Doesn't matter whether it's the finance manager, the GM, the service manager, they need to be high-value leaders. Because now those leaders, ownership, up here, that's their team. Ownership should only talk to the leaders, not to the 150, 300 people, 500 people that Tyler has working for them.

Tyler has knowledge of everybody that works for him. He might not know intimately well absolutely everyone down to the Nth degree, but I know he cares. As somebody who knows very little about Tyler, very, very little about Tyler. But I see what he puts out there. I see the stuff that he's getting himself into. I see the stuff that he's trying to do and what he's doing for the community that I have spent the last 20 years in. It would be amazing to work for an individual who cared for the entire crew, not just a few that are making him money: the entire crew. He cares as much about the people who cost him money as he does the people who make him money, because there's all kinds of people that cost him money. The entire accounting apartment doesn't make him any money. You, well, that's a different story because you're sales and marketing.

The Diesel Queen:

True, true.

Josh Taylor:

Don't discredit yourself on that. But all of those things cost him money. But he values everybody that works for him. And I understand that looking from the outside in.

The Diesel Queen:

And it transfers over to his customers, too.

Josh Taylor:

Exactly. I sound like I need be wearing knee pads right now, but I see it, right? It's hard to come by those people. I'm in SDL every Sunday morning and I'm surrounded by 30 to 40 sometimes. I think we almost had 40 plus on one of the Sundays. It's that leadership that trickles down, because you get somebody who cares at the top and genuinely carries the top and doesn't do... We talk about food all the time, and I had this discussion a little while ago, but food is important to a mechanic, especially free food. And you go into things like, I'm sorry, pineapple belongs on people and I will die on that hill. And in a shop full of people, it doesn't matter whether you give them a gift card to Amazon or pizza party or whatever the case may or whatever you call it. That's not what the shop wants. That's not building culture. That's not building relationships. That's not showing empathy or anything else like that. You're not listening to your team. High-value leaders know already.

The last thing that Tyler's going to do, for example, if there was 10 of you, or similar to you on the team, all doing similar things in your shop where you're rebuilding engines or you're rebuilding transmissions, rebuilding diffs, having that all ready for the training facility and there's 10 just like you, meaning that you do CrossFit and you do athletics and you are on camera and you're taking care of what you look like and what you eat like. Is he going to put a whole pile of pizza in front of you? You'll probably eat it. You're a mechanic.

The Diesel Queen:

Oh, absolutely. I'm going to fucking eat it. Absolutely.

Josh Taylor:

You're a mechanic. You're absolutely going to eat it. It's free food. But are you, as an individual on that team, going to go, "He knows I have a show in two weeks, right? He knows I'm going to go and lift literally for eight hours at an event. This is not on my prep. I'm still going to eat it, but it's not on my prep." Right?

The Diesel Queen:

No, I get what you're trying to say.

Josh Taylor:

As someone who lifts, and I'm lactose intolerant, and I'm gluten intolerant, I'm still going to fucking eat the pizza. But I'm not going to think highly of my leader because he provided pizza. In fact, it's probably the opposite. It's like, does he actually know me? And again, I can take that to the Nth degree. My son, in grade one, we go in for parent-teacher interviews and the teacher goes, "He's having trouble with his dexterity. He's not writing very well. We expect him to be a little bit better than he is, and he doesn't seem to be able to doing very well at any of the cutting out." Because my wife is, my wife goes, "Did you give him left-handed scissors? He's left-handed." The teacher, who's had my son in a front desk in her class for six weeks, had not recognized that this poor kid is left-handed. That is a definition of a poor leader. That is what high-value leaders recognize.

The Diesel Queen:

That's a good story and analogy there. I bring up Honnen a lot because I have a lot of good experiences with that company, but Mark Honnen himself always impressed me, always. And there's a few reasons why. Reason one, he hired people underneath him to do their jobs, and for the most part, he trusted in them to do their jobs. He was not constantly trying to interfere with everybody's shit. If he hired you as a service manager, he trusted that you were going to be a service manager. And he, for the most part, was very good at hiring people for their roles.

Number two, I swear to God, this man had a photographic memory. He remembered every single person. You would have somebody walk in for an interview, and then walk out and then here comes Mark Honnen and he's like, "So how did so-and-so do?" And we're like, "Who the fuck is so-and-so? Oh, the kid that just got interviewed." We're like, "How the fuck did you know that?" But he pays so much attention to the people in his company, even just little people, the mechanics. He used to make us laugh 'cause he made his kids hand us out donuts on Christmas. He made them walk around the shop and hand out everybody donuts. That was fucking awesome. But he did, and it wasn't just because your name was on your shirt. You'd be at a company event and he would know who you are. You'd see him out in public, he would know who you are.

And he was such a humble person. For an example, they sponsored the dirt bike races in Colorado, the Thunder Valley National Dirt Bike races. More like they rented them equipment and the guys didn't really pay their bills. So to trade for that, they made an announcement about Honnen Equipment, had the machines on display during the races, and gave a bunch of free employee tickets. So anybody who's anybody that wanted to go to these dirt bike races, if you worked for Honnen, you could go. And I remember going to these races and Honnen Equipment is on the motherfucking wristbands, right? This event is his fucking event. And he's over there and he's talking to me and he talks to everybody. He knows all the customers that are in the tent. Don't ask me how he knows them, but he does: everybody.

And we're walking out of the event, and we're walking down the middle of the road, and there's this cop honking at us and telling us to get out of the middle of the road. They're like, "You guys need to get out of the road, blah, blah, blah." It's like, dude, this is Mark Honnen. Honnen, his name's on the fucking wristband. But instead of going up to the cop and being like, "Dude, my name's on the fucking wristband. I'm a huge fucking sponsor of this event." Instead of doing that, he just, like a normal person, got out of the way and moved over to the side of the road and continued our conversation. And he was always like that.

He didn't have to push his power. He didn't have to push his weight around. He didn't have to constantly remind people who he was and what he did and "I'm the boss," you know? And he protected me from a lot. We had a lady when I first started there that wanted to spread my name and my face all over everything Honnen. "A girl mechanic. Oh my God, let's spread her name all over everything and put her face on everything." And Mark told her, go fuck herself. I'm sure that's not what he said, but he told her pretty much to go fuck herself, that I'm here to do a job and I'm here to learn and let me work and leave me alone. And that was a fucking blessing.

Josh Taylor:

You bring up a really key point. This person, because you're a female mechanic, they want to bring you up and put your name everywhere and put your plaster anywhere. And I've said this a while back, and I've been saying this for a long time. There is no gender in mechanic. There's no such thing. Personally, there is no female mechanic. There is no male mechanic. There is no she's days, whatever. You're a mechanic. That's it.

The Diesel Queen:

Well, it's just a job. It's like everything else.

Josh Taylor:

I think it transcends that, to be honest, because it doesn't matter what's under your coveralls. You're going to get dirty, you're going to get covered in shit. You're going to get covered in ice and snow and salt and dirt and grime and people's shit and dirty diapers, and whatever happens to be in on and around the car. You're still going to fix the thing. You're going to still give it back better than you got it, and you're going to make it safe so that people can drive and go on in their day. It doesn't matter what's under the coveralls. There's no such thing as gender in mechanics. Car comes in, it gets fixed, it leaves.

The Diesel Queen:

I've always been a big advocate of: there are shitty mechanics, there are average mechanics, and there are good mechanics, and there is no relevance to gender. I've ran across this personally, where I haven't really received any negative sexism. For the most part, I'm more than welcome in the shops, people are happy to help me. They're scared...

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [01:15:04]

The Diesel Queen:

... more than welcome in the shops, people are happy to help me, they're scared to talk to me for at least a month, but still, everybody's always supportive, the customers are happy to see me, especially the customers that get to know me, they know I'm there, they appreciate my work, they're happy to have me. I also was in Wyoming where women in the trade wasn't a weird thing, but I have not ran into the, "You're a shitty mechanic because you're a girl," besides the keyboard warriors, which they don't count. What I have ran into is people think that because I'm a woman, I am automatically a good mechanic. They have this mindset that they've been trained, right? Because they're scared to say anything sexist. So, the men in this industry have almost been mentally trained to think that women are good mechanics, right? That's not actually-

Josh Taylor:

I guess the philosophy is that-

The Diesel Queen:

You can be a shit mechanic and be a woman.

Josh Taylor:

Well, absolutely. But, I guess the philosophy is like it is in many industries that most women, whether it's... And I don't know any data in to this regard, all I get is what's stuffed down my face by media and social media and news and so on and so forth. But, the concept is is that because there are so few of you folks in a male dominated industries that you have to work extra hard, you have to be extra smart, to do whatever or accomplish whatever and that's why I say-

The Diesel Queen:

That's such bullshit. That is such bullshit.

Josh Taylor:

I think it's bullshit, especially being a mechanic. You're going to be thrown in the trenches, regardless of what's under your overalls, it doesn't matter. You're going to be shoveling shit.

The Diesel Queen:

Honestly, there's always people that ride... I have met men that still, I still, everybody still rides a struggle bus sometimes, right? Yeah, yeah, I think that's such bullshit because everybody has to prove themselves, and I am so so against using your gender as an excuse to get your way. Oh, I'm not proving myself, but I really want this engine work. I feel like I deserve to have engine work, so I'm going to go to my service manager and I'm going to claim sexism, and I'm going to say, "He is not giving me these jobs because I'm a woman to get these jobs." That's fucked up.

I think everybody should be at the equal level playing field, and it is, for the most part, it is. The trades, especially when you look at big shops, they care about numbers, performance. They don't give a fuck if you're a woman or a guy. If you're performing well, you're performing well. If you're not, you're not. You can't use, and I've seen men do this too, find excuses as to why they're not performing well, or make up excuses or whatever. But, I can't stand people that pull the gender card to get their way. I'm not saying there aren't situations where that's appropriate because maybe there is some negative sexism going on, but I've always been an advocate that, "I wanted this to be treated like I'm one of the guys. I want to be treated the exact same way as everybody else.

The only thing I want different is my own fucking bathroom." That is all I want. I will wear their jeans, I will wear their shirts. I will do any job that they do. Well, I mean, for the most part, all the shops I work at, there's office ladies that have their own bathroom anyways, but it's like that's the only thing that I've ever asked for specifically is, "Can I have my own fucking bathroom?" For the most part, all they do is put lockers in the girls' bathroom, which I'm totally fucking fine with. I'm cool with that. I'm not high fucking maintenance at all. But, over the years, I gained a lot of respect from that.

But, I've had to start approaching new employers in the manner of making a point to tell them, "Hey, I am not going to be an HR nightmare. If I have a problem with somebody in the shop..." If, which is a rare occurrence, it's what I always tell them because it is. "If on the rare occurrence I have a problem with somebody in the shop, I'm going to bring that to you. If you and I cannot solve it, I don't need to work here. HR does not need to be involved. No one needs to lose their job. I'm not selfish like that. I can go find another job. Maybe this isn't the shop for me."

Josh Taylor:

That may very well be a female thing because whether it's a female thing or not, I don't think it's relevant because at the end of the day, every person in that shop should be like that. If I can't resolve, and this is conflict resolution, and we're having the same, we're having difficulty with my son who's having difficulty resolving conflict at school because for two and a half years he hasn't had to deal with people contact. He hasn't had to deal with children his age. So, he doesn't know how to react, he doesn't know how to respond. Even though the kid's got a probationary black belt in TaeKwonDo, it doesn't matter, he's not allowed to use it, and as confident as a nine year old can possibly be, he doesn't know how to be confident and deal with conflict.

Well, it doesn't matter what gender you are, you need to learn how to resolve conflict, and you need to do it person to person. It should not necessarily come to fist. Now, I have my own inequities when it comes to that because there are certain things that should, for the most part, we're men at some point, in all likelihood, there's going to be a fist thrown at some point if it gets that point, or at least a threat of it needs to be present, because you need to stand the fuck up. But, at the same time, you shouldn't need to ever have HR. HR Gets involved when you can't resolve the conflict like adults.

The Diesel Queen:

Yeah, and at that point, it's probably not the shop you need to work in.

Josh Taylor:

Exactly.

The Diesel Queen:

That's always been my take on it because, well, there's been plenty of stories of girls, so and so looked at me wrong, so I'm going to go report it to HR, or I don't feel like my service manager is giving me the jobs I want because I'm a woman, so I'm going to go to HR, and that's a rarity by the way, with women in this industry. Most of the women in this industry, we're pretty tough people, we're pretty strong personalities that don't like... We can handle our own pretty fucking fine. Right? But, on a rare occasion-

Josh Taylor:

I don't think it's gender related. I don't think it's gender related.

The Diesel Queen:

It's not, but it's pointed out, it is.

Josh Taylor:

I think it's personality related, because I can tell you right now, there are answers on a survey. There are answers on a survey right now that say, "Need to delegate the work better. You need to stop the gravy feeding." Well, I need to figure out using the data from the survey, whether gravy feeding is something that comes up consistently in some of the answers. Well, if you're in a 25 person shop and 20 people are saying people are being fed gravy and five people aren't, in all likelihood, the five people that haven't said anything, are the people being fed.

But, if only one person is saying, "People are being fed gravy," or this or that or whatever, "They're not giving me work," this or that or the other. Has nothing necessarily to do with gender, and everything to do with how the dispatching is being done. Well, maybe these people are high producers and they get the work done and they don't complain and they're trained and they're certified and the customers are happy to see them, and they've built up... Maybe they have 10 or 15 years of experience at that store and have built a rapport with the customers, and that's why they're being fed work, because the customers are coming and saying, "Hey, I want Joe to work on my car and only Joe to work on my car."

The Diesel Queen:

Yeah, that's that.

Josh Taylor:

Or, they're coming in and say, "Hey, I only want Melissa to work? Nobody else is touching my car except Melissa. Period. End of chat." Then with a context, the rest of the mechanics in the shop are going, "They're being fed gravy." Well, if Melissa has worked on that car randomly twice in a row and that customer has now realized that Melissa's been on the work, or twice in a row, and every time the car went in, it came out fixed, the first time, a rapport is built, and then now there's a trend, and now the customer wants to see Melissa every single time.

Well, not everybody knows that. Well, it's awfully hard to communicate that, but that's up to the service leader. Need to understand that you need to know your team. The rest of the team needs to stop... This is where I'm trying to combat both sides of the coin, because service leaders have a lot of responsibility on their shoulders. If you go to shop a 20, you've got the lives of 20 families in your hands, right? That is what they do. They have the lives and wellbeing of 20 people in their hands, and it's a big responsibility to know that much responsibility is on your shoulders. But, they also need to communicate and they have all the responsibility, they have training and all the responsibility of all the mentorship and trying to delegate all that and the service devices, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's up to us mechanics to make sure that we're treating each other like human beings. We are just as accountable for our own training as a service leader is. We are just as accountable for our wellbeing in the shop and how we act in the shop as a service leader is. If you're an asshole, you're responsible for that.

The Diesel Queen:

Yeah.

Josh Taylor:

If nobody wants to work with you or help you when you're doing a hard job and you want to get it done so you can go home, and nobody wants to help you, you're the asshole, not the rest of people in the shop. You need to behold yourself accountable.

The Diesel Queen:

I agree with that. I agree with that completely. I would put myself on a slightly above average scale as far as mechanicing goes, because I still have my struggles, I really do, and after seven years, I feel like I've just barely scraped the surface of the knowledge I can have, and the potential that I have, and I think that's with everybody. Potential comes... There's a lot of years, it takes a lot of years to learn this, but I've met 10 year mechanics that have no idea what CAN bus is. Not a fucking clue.

Josh Taylor:

And no desire to learn it either.

The Diesel Queen:

Yeah, and I've met 10 year mechanics that are still fine with having their handheld. I've always been the type of person that I was independent to a fault, I guess. It took me a long time to figure out that it's okay, like exhaust all your resources, right? Don't just be the person that the second you can't figure something out, go ask for help. Exhaust all your resources and then ask for help. It's okay. Everybody needs help sometimes, and it took me a long time to reach that stage, and I was always really, really hard on myself when I fucked something up. I was always really hard on myself. At one point, I fucked something up, it was a backhoe transmission, and I fucked it up and I was being so hard on myself about it.

My boss walked out and he looked at me and he is like, "Well, I was going to shoot your ass for this, but it looks like you're already chewing your ass harder than I would've. So, I'm just going to let you continue to beat yourself up over this, and I'm going to go back to my office. Just don't let it last more than 10 minutes, and then get back to work." But, that's just how it was because I was so fucking hard on myself, because I wanted so bad to be the best. I wanted that so bad, and that is just fucking missing from a lot of mechanics. They don't care, or they already think that they are up here and they don't think... I've told this story before where I've gone to a capstone training for graders and I wasn't even a year in and I went to this capstone training knowing I touched a grand total of two graders and I didn't know what the fuck was going on.

There's a lot of moving shit going on. I'm new to equipment, I'm new to... I don't know what the fuck. I went into that training knowing that I needed to learn, and I fucking smoked everybody in that class as far as grades, and there's a couple that were close to me, but the one particular man was an older gentleman and he spent the entire time boasting about how, "I know everything there is to know about graders. I've been working on graders for 20 years. I know I don't fucking need to be here," blah, blah, blah, blah. He hardly passed. He hardly passed. He got his ass fucking kicked. Horribly bad by a 19 year old girl with less than the year of experience.

But, it's not about... Like is he probably a better mechanic than me at the time? Absolutely. But, I still, it's about your attitude going into things. If you go into things with the attitude of like, "I want to learn, there's a lot here to be offered, I want to learn, and I want to do good." You're going to go a lot farther than the other people that think they already know everything.

Josh Taylor:

What's that phrase? If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. That applies to learning, that applies to life, that applies to so many things, especially in the mechanics. Because, yes, you can do most things alone. What we do every day doesn't matter whether you're on your back or you're on a hoist or you're under a crane, lifting up something several tons, some shit you really shouldn't be doing alone because that really fucking isn't safe to do alone, because all it takes, you can end your life so fast on so many things, touching too many things that you shouldn't at the same fucking time. It just needs another set of hands that, "Hey, hey, hey, don't touch that." That saves your life.

The Diesel Queen:

Well, and it's down to even like really simple things like I learned this lesson is if it takes you two hours to line up fucking pins in an excavator coupler to the stick because you got to fucking get out, move it, try to push pin and get out, move it, try to... It's going to take you fucking two hours to do that by yourself, or it's going to take 15 minutes to get the technician next to you to run the machine while you line it up. Even if he clocks onto your job, that's 30 minutes worth of billed time, versus two hours of your time, and the team, that's where you were talking about, like the team dynamic of a shop comes into play, because if you've got a good group of mechanics that obviously there's not like a heavy dependency, but there's enough independency and dependency of a mixture that they know what they can do by themselves and they understand what's more efficient to do by themselves, but they also understand where having help is the right answer, that flows so much better.

Having that team atmosphere in a shop is so fucking... It's so much better than having every mechanic's there for themselves, every mechanic's out for themselves, because if you can work together on things, every mechanic looks at things a little bit differently, every mechanic does their job a little bit differently. So, when you have a group of mechanics that can work together and create and have all of those be pretty much everybody's strong suits, then you have a really efficient team and you probably have a happy shop because they probably get along well and they're working together and they're solving problems and they're getting work out the door. Shop atmosphere is freaking huge, and I don't think service managers all the time understand that.

Josh Taylor:

In every show and everything that I'm a part of, I try to somehow work my way into in some form of movie quote or some form of movie reference. So, I'm going to reference 300.

The Diesel Queen:

Oh, go on.

Josh Taylor:

Spartans, if you love that movie, you already probably know what I'm going to say or what I'm going to talk about. But, Spartans were so successful in real life, like back in the day when Spartans were Spartans, when that actually existed and happened, when the movie they put, they say a couple of very simple things that make a lot of sense in teams. Spartans weren't necessarily successful because they were literally bred to be warriors, they were literally bred to be leaders, and how to use and trained from, I think, the age of six or something like that. They weren't successful because of that. They were successful because the man to their left protected them from thigh to neck.

The Diesel Queen:

Yeah.

Josh Taylor:

Period. If nothing else happened, they had their brother to the left. That's why I preach in this trade, especially now you don't get this when you're out in the field necessarily, but you definitely get it when you're in a shop. Your bay mate is the single most important person in your day, because when you can't fix something, you can bounce ideas off. If you need to stop and decompress because you're banging your head against a concrete wall, you go outside and you have a smoke. If you can't fix something, you need help, you ask them questions, and when you go home at night, it's somebody to bitch, whine, complain and vent to, so that tomorrow when you get back to work, you're having shared experiences, you have shared learning, you have someone who holds you accountable to your bullshit every day. You have somebody that lift you up when you come in and, "She broke up with me last night." It's like, "Okay, let's get through this job and tonight we'll go out for beers." Whatever the case may be. That bay mate and that environment is vital for a mechanic's success, I believe.

The Diesel Queen:

Well, and there's a lot of bouncing off that a lot of people refer to a shop as a family. It's a family atmosphere. A lot of people, a lot of mechanics. You spend 10 hours a day with those people.

Josh Taylor:

Do you agree with the family or not?

The Diesel Queen:

It depends on the shop. There's some shops where everybody's friends with each other, they go out and do group stuff together, they go to events together, and it's sort of like a family dynamic that you always have each other's back, you've got the best interests at heart and everybody's putting in their efforts, and then there's other shops where it's like, "I mean, this feels, if this is a family, this is one dysfunctional mother fucking family.

Josh Taylor:

It almost always is, isn't it?

The Diesel Queen:

Yeah. But, you spend a lot of fucking time with these people. A lot of time. Some people spend more waking hours with their coworkers than they do with their own family.

Josh Taylor:

If you spend more time at work than you do with your loved ones, and the environment you're in all day is toxic, so that's why I'm doing what I'm doing.

The Diesel Queen:

Cool. Good.

Josh Taylor:

I'm really happy to hear what you're doing. I'm really happy to hear what you're doing because you're doing-

The Diesel Queen:

You can thank Tyler for that.

Josh Taylor:

I will. I absolutely will, and thank you for it because there needs to be more of us.

The Diesel Queen:

We're trying.

Josh Taylor:

There absolutely needs to be more of us from every aspect, from every corner, because there's almost a million of us in North America alone. I can't talk to everybody. You can't talk to everybody. There's more enough to go around for everybody to get a piece and help.

The Diesel Queen:

Yeah.

Josh Taylor:

So, thank you for what you're doing. I truly, genuinely appreciate it.

The Diesel Queen:

Well, you're welcome. I'm trying, I'm not even close to what you're doing, but a lot of my shit's just trying to understand the problem with why people aren't getting into this industry, which I know what it is, obviously. I know a lot of the reasoning as to why, but this is not an evil industry, and this industry, there's so much pride in your job. This is one of the most fulfilling jobs you can ever have. To me, being a mechanic was very fulfilling, and the best fucking feeling in the motherfucking world was when you finished a big job and you rolled that thing out of the shop and washed it up and cleaned it up and buttoned it up, and it was all pretty and it ran perfect, and that customer took it and had a smile on their face. That like the best fucking thing ever.

People have this really skewed image of what... They don't see that, they don't see the good things, and sometimes toxic shops can ruin the entire point of being a mechanic, the entire all the joys of being a mechanic, and at some point mechanics get beaten down to the point where they just fucking leave the industry. Which is sad because at one point in time they loved what they did.

Josh Taylor:

Exactly. All of us had to get in for a reason, and everybody's got a reason why they left. So, it's up to you and I and Tyler and a select few that have taken up the torch to try and help people stay, improve the industry enough so that people stay, improve the industry enough so more people come, and improve the industry even more so that even more people come, and more people stay, improve their lives, help them make more money, help them be happy with their families, help them be happy at work.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [01:37:22]